Of Two Minds

Posted on November 13, 2024 by thezman

Everyone in every time has thought that his time was crazier and less predictable than the times that came before him. Much of this is due to recency bias, but another cause is the sense that things were better in the past. This sense that the past was better is a part of the human makeup. There is not only a nostalgia for the our own past, but for the past we never experienced. That is because the past seems more certain than our present age and the near future.

People who lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War looked back at those days with fondness. These were people enjoying 1950’s America reminiscing about one of the worst times in American history. Many even lost family members in the war, but those war years felt like the best of times. Our minds seem to have evolved in such a way that we cannot remember pain. That means what we can recall about our past is only the good feelings we experienced.

It also depends upon who you are at the time as well. If you were a black person in the 1950’s then it was a wild time to be alive. The civil right revolution was getting going and the role blacks were given was to riot in the streets. The typical white guy living in California was just enjoying his time. On the other hand, the war years were a good time to be black in America as the war economy needed labor. Millions of black people found lucrative work in northern cities.

That is something to keep in mind while watching present events. It certainly seems like it is a crazy time to be alive. The whole Trump thing is wild, just from the perspective of American politics. People also seem nuttier. This was evident during the Covid panic when millions of otherwise normal looking people revealed themselves to be bitter paranoid cranks. Now the anti-Trump loons are going into hiding, by which they mean the latest alternative to Twitter.

It is not just the usual suspects losing their minds over the election. The British tabloid The Guardian has announced on Twitter, oddly enough, that it is stomping off in a huff, presumably to set up shop on the alternative to Twitter. They claim it is because of the “far-right conspiracy theories and racism.” That means a publication that traffics in conspiracy theories about the imaginary far-right and racism is abandoning the one place they are sure such things exist.

Even putting aside the natural bias described at the start, this is crazy behavior that did not exist just ten years ago. The crazy times ten years ago were both sides meeting in the streets to point fingers and maybe scuffle a bit. More important, the people we call the left had institutional support, so they controlled the battlefield. This fact has been true for as long as anyone has been alive, so seeing them abandon the battlefield and go into hiding qualifies this as a crazy time to be alive.

Of course, the reason this is happening is the big election victory of Donald Trump and the temporary ascendency of his party. It was not just a big win for Trump on Tuesday, but also a big win for the movement that made him possible. The reason that movement exists is the growing insanity of the people we call the left. In other words, we probably do live in a crazy age, even when people have the ability to step back and look at it from a distance. This really is a crazy age.

The thing about this crazy age is that not much is happening. The exciting times a century ago revolved around the Great War. The mobilization of America for war in Europe was unprecedented. The war itself was unprecedented, and its aftermath was also unprecedented. Enormously important things were happening. In this present age, everything happens on the internet and slightly affects events outside the digital space, but only in superficial ways.

Put another way, we live in a crazy time because this new virtual reality we created called the internet has sucked into it many of our least stable people, empowering them to unleash their craziness in this virtual realm. Imagine a version of the past twenty years in which the crazy people were denied access to the internet. Imagine if all the foreign policy debates since the Cold War had been conducted online by people like John Mearsheimer rather than crazies from the Kagan cult.

What makes this a crazy time is we are living in a unique period and what makes it unique is this virtual realm we call the internet. Everyone is forced to one degree or another to live with two minds. There is the mind that exists in the virtual realm and then there is the mind that exists in the physical realm. Note that you rarely discuss with people in the physical realm your life in the virtual realm. These are two distinct worlds that require two distinct minds.

On the other hand, the growth of this new virtual world has had the effect of collapsing the two minds for some people. The crazies online are made crazy, in part, by the invasion of the private space by the public space. Prior to the internet, these people could only do politics by participating in it publicly. Most just avoided politics and remained privately nuts, but free of public politics. Plugged into the internet, the public rushes into the private and the private becomes public.

This may explain the phenomenon of the seemingly stable person heading off into crazy land as they get increasingly online. People like James Lindsay or Keith Olbermann are good examples of people who started out a bit odd, but not so odd that you questioned their sanity. They steadily evolved into crazy people online. When there was separation between their public and private mind, we did not see the madness, because it existed outside of public view.

In the fullness of time, people may look at this time and think it was the calm waters before the terrible rapids. Maybe they look at this is as a gentle adjustment period between the Cold War and whatever comes next. it is also possible that it is the crazy time when people had to adjust to the two-mind problem. The growth of the virtual realm created a need for an entirely novel mode of thought, the mind you activate when inside the internet, along with a way of isolating it from the other mind.

It may be that we arrive at a new way of judging people. At the top of the hierarchy are those who master both minds, deftly balancing them to be high status in both the material world and the virtual world. At the bottom are the people who allow the virtual realm to take over their mind entirely, making it seem that they are as crazy in real life as they seem online. In the middle are the vast majority who struggle to balance their internet mind with their material mind.

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The Restoration

Posted on November 11, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the weird noises coming from the regime after the election, a post about the odd quiet that we are seeing after Trump swept the field and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Legend has it that at the start of the trial of English King Charles I, Oliver Cromwell saw the king approaching Westminster Hall and realized he had a problem. He quickly warned his fellow parliamentarians that the king would ask a very straightforward question at the opening of the trial. He would demand to know upon what authority was he being brought to a trial. This is, in fact, what happened. Charles refused to enter a plea on the grounds the court had no authority over him.

The drama about Cromwell seeing the king’s approach and then suddenly seeing his problem is apocryphal, as the parliamentarians had been debating this issue since the end of the Second English Civil War. According to English law, the king could not be tried for breaking the law. Logically, the king was the law. The king was the sovereign and therefore the embodiment of the nation and its laws. Putting the king on trial was putting the system itself on trial.

Cromwell and his pals got around this problem by simply wielding the power they had, which was the force of arms, to override objections from members of parliament, the House of Lords and the king himself. When Charles asked “I would know by what power I am called hither. I would know by what authority, I mean lawful authority”, the parliamentarians decided that “the King of England was not a person, but an office whose every occupant was entrusted with a limited power to govern.”

In other words, the long-held principles both sides claimed to support, over which they fought two bloody wars to that point, gave way to political expediency. Cromwell and the New Model Army had power, and they were determined to keep it, which meant killing the king and what he represented. If it meant trampling a thousand years of tradition and the law itself, they were prepared to do it. The trial proceeded as if the Charles confessed his guilt, and he was soon executed.

The French Revolution gets all the attention when it comes the crisis of liberalism, but it is the English Civil War that presents the problem plainly. By what authority can a parliament rule over a people? The answer always given is the people, but by what authority do the people have to pick their rulers? Where is it written that the people are the moral arbiter of society? Modern people think the answer is obvious, but for most of human history people thought the opposite.

The reason we have that story about Cromwell looking out of the window of Westminster Hall and suddenly realizing his dilemma is because people at the time understood the power of authority. The king was just a man, but what he represented was earthly dominion over man. No one looked at the king as just a man because he was the final authority, the one man who was an exception to the law, while being the embodiment of the law. He was the sovereign.

It is why after Cromwell’s death, the monarchy was restored. Despite it all, Cromwell was never able to answer the question posed by Charles at his trial. The authority of Parliament is in the law, but the authority of the law is in the king. Without a king, those in control of Parliament were left with force as their authority. It is easy to see why Mao famously said that political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The question of authority has haunted the world since that famous trial.

We are getting a glimpse of this with the election of Trump. Fifty years ago, the managerial class staged a coup against Nixon. Like the Rump Parliament that deposed Charles I, they acted extrajudicially but claimed to be doing so in defense of the law, which is a contradiction that cannot be resolved. They rid themselves of the imperial presidency, reducing the office and the rest of the political structures to committees controlled by the managerial class.

Then as now, the central question in the crisis is who says? Much of what constitutes the crisis of the American empire is people shouting from screens, demanding you must do this or must stop doing that. Everywhere you turn is a digital preacher, waging her bony finger at you and lecturing about your sins. The Roundhead ascendency that began with Watergate climaxed with men in dresses calling normal people sinners, but always the question remained. Who says?

The restoration of Donald Trump is an answer of sorts. Whatever his faults, Trump is a man who commands attention and respect. When he enters a room, the room changes because he is larger than life. He persevered over the last four years of official persecution through force of will. He returns to Washington as the leader of the victorious side in the cold civil war that has gripped the country. He also returns with an agenda and a mandate to execute it.

None of this is to say that Trump is the monarch or our moral authority. The point of the comparison is that the executive exists to replicate that role in a democratic system that lacks a moral authority. Without energy in the executive, the president cannot play the role the system requires to function. The last fifty years has seen the rise of rule by committee, and no one builds monuments to committees. Just as Parliament needed the king, Washington needs Trump.

It still leaves open that question. Monarchy solved the problem by making the king the sovereign and the answer to who says? In America, Christianity was assumed to be the answer most of the time. The exceptions required a strong executive to make the hard decisions and force the legislature to act. First the melting away of Christianity then the toppling of the strong executive left us with rule by committee and the fanciful chants about democracy to answer the question of authority.

Trump will not reign forever, so the question will return. Perhaps the managerial elite sees the problem and supports the return of the imperial presidency as a solution to the internal contradictions of managerialism. Maybe the economic elite supports the strong executive as a proxy for their supremacy over the managerial class, much in the way the king was the leader of the aristocracy. Maybe Washington falls into chaos again, as managerialism reaches its end.

In the end, political systems rise and fall on the question of authority. The moral questions in every society are either answered by the gods or by the people though their traditions and customs. Centuries of experience in self-government says we simply cannot accept “because we say so” as an answer. You either have a strong executive with the power to impress or you have a shared religion that answers all the important moral questions. Managerialism has neither.

Time On The Cross

Posted on November 4, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the proliferation of rage heads who can only communicate in emotions, a post about how we have become a nation of liars and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

The British conservative party, known as the Tories, finally settled on a new leader after they were nearly zeroed out in the last election. The pick to lead the party is a Nigerian woman calling herself Kemi Badenoch. Her official name is Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch, but that is far too British these days, so she has shortened it to a single word “Kemi” like pop stars do. She is now the face of the party that is supposedly the face of traditional English people.

The absurdity of this is obvious to most people, but not to everyone. The people running the Tory party are over the moon with this. Many of them are snickering into their sleeves about how the Labour party is “pale, stale and male.” Other are sure that it will take a Nigerian princess to restore British honor and finally confront the multicultural forces that have turned Britain into a zoo. This is their version of “Mexicans are natural conservatives”, popular with American conservatives.

The ridiculousness of this does not stop there. Look at the career of Kemi Badenoch through a traditional lens and her resume is a baffling mix of things that have no connection to one another or fit into a clear theme. She bounced from one thing to another, never accomplishing much but then suddenly she became a hot property among the consultancy class. That is where she was discovered by the political class and turned into a Yoruba version of Barak Obama.

The parsimonious explanation for Kemi Badenoch’s shambolic rise to the top of the Tory party is something John Derbyshire observed about Barak Obama when he suddenly burst on the scene. What appears to be a random walk preceding the meteoric rise is the result of the warm thermals created by white guilt over race and the desires and projects to seek forgiveness. The idealized black flits about until finally catching the sharp upward gust into the clouds.

Upper and middle-class whites in the Anglosphere seem to be driven to do these things, in part, by a desire to be ruled by Africans, who just happen to agree with them or “hold their values”, as they prefer to state it. There is also the desire to be punished by Africans, but not so much as to cause them real harm. They prefer the harm to fall on the bad whites. Then there is the strong undertow of salvation. These whites believe that this process will lead to their salvation.

This explains the weird exultation we see from these whites when a chosen one turns up to confirm the prophesies. The mania over Barak Obama was so bizarre people compared it to the cult of personality seen in places like North Korea. The Obama fans could tell you almost nothing about him, but that did not matter as simply being in the mobs worshipping him provided the religious experience they desired. You see the same look among the Tory members regarding Kemi Badenoch.

It is easy to mock this, but this behavior is driven by strong cultural and spiritual forces, and it is having a real impact. This phenomenon is mostly a product of the United States, exported around the West. The desire to build a city on a hill evolved into a sense of shame coupled with a desire to heal the world. The result is something approaching idolatry, with the well-behaved black person being treated like an emissary of God, who must be allowed to perform his miracles.

It is not an accident that the script writers for Barak Obama had him say things like “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Many people dismissed it as emotive nonsense, but the line has African origins. For the intended audience, white, educated and upper-middle-class, the line struck like a thunderclap. They were the elect and the proof of this was their presence in the cult of Obama. Not only was the promised land near, but salvation was also at hand.

Salvation never came and the result was a decade of madness. It is not an accident that the street violence and other engineered destruction of the basics of society started in the middle of Obama’s last term. At that point, it was clear to all that salvation was not coming, so they had no choice but to search for a villain. This sort of cult like behavior never turns to self-reflection in the face of disconfirmation. Instead, the energy in search of salvation channels into the search for the devil.

It remains to be seen if this is the process in Old Blighty. The Tories are in the political wilderness for a few more years. Labour, which won the last election, is as popular as rectal cancer and faces nothing but bad options. Britain is much closer to economic and social collapse than anyone in power appreciates. Throw in the fact that Black Jesus is not supposed to come from what passes for the right and it seems unlikely that Kemi Badenoch will follow the Obama arc.

Instead, what this looks like is what we see all over the West these days and that is a reboot of an old classic but done by ham and eggers. The Tories, like their American counterparts, have reached the logical end of what has passed for conservatism since the middle of the last century. The only remaining constituency for conservatism is the economic elites who seek to keep the old dialectic going. In the end, this gambit will fail to change their political fortunes.

There is more to it though. This unsatisfied desire for forgiveness that lies at the heart of this worship of Africans in the Anglosphere is not going away, because there is no mechanism to achieve it. Christianity, from which this desire was inherited, had mechanisms for forgiveness of sin. It also had a logic to address those things for which forgiveness in this life was not possible. The secular ideologies that rose up to replace Christianity have no such mechanisms.

Each turn of the wheel has led to a more reckless pursuit of salvation, because “more of the same” is the only possible answer to the inevitable failure. It is why we have gone from the reasonable extension of legal protections to former slaves to a world of unlimited non-white immigration and the erasure of white people from the cultural spaces, like movies, television and advertising. The burning desire to cleanse their souls of this sin has led to the desire to burn it all down.

What this suggests is that the antidote to what is killing the West is something that will lead the people to come down from their cross of ebony and embrace a new moral framing which gives them a purpose that elevates their people, rather than sacrificing them in search of forgiveness. That is unlikely to be found in the past. Instead, it will be found in the rubble of decline. At some point, even the fanatic must submit to reality or at least be overcome by it and those who rise from it.

The Dunning-Kruger Crisis

Posted on October 31, 2024 by thezman

Much has been written in these parts about the crisis of competence that is creepy up on all aspects of life like the fog. Every day, competent people are aging out and being replaced by people who lack the competence. A complimentary problem, one also driven by demographics, is the Dunning-Kruger crisis. This the problem of incompetent, but highly confidence people, getting elevated into positions for which they are unqualified, simply due to the new ethics of the elites.

The difference here is that the crisis of competence is somewhat correctable, as the unqualified millennial replacing the retiring boomer, has some hope of learning what he needs to learn to do the job. He and his organization will have to suffer through the learning curve, but there is hope he will become competent. Alternatively, the race to supplement or even replace the incompetent millennial with technology offers the alternative of a robot competently doing the job.

The Dunning-Kruger, in contrast, offers no such hope. The person elevated into the position to satisfy the needs of the new morality has no chance to ever become competent at the task. Replacing them with technology is impossible, because it would undermine the whole point of the process. Instead, the system is simply expected to adapt to these new islands of confident incompetence. Every organization is being loaded up with crosses to bear as a form of contrition.

You see how this works with the Kamala Harris campaign. Regardless of the result, it will be remembered as one of the most inept operations in modern history, perhaps rivaling the 2004 Howard Dean campaign in Iowa or even the 1988 Mike Dukakis presidential campaign. After the initial media gaslighting, it has been one unforced error after another, all stemming from the fact the people running the campaign are sure they know everything, but in fact know nothing.

One small example is the Joe Rogan flap. Rogan is the biggest carnival act in so-called new media, so doing his show would be like doing Johnny Carson back in the 1970’s or the Rush Limbaugh show in the 1990’s. It offers a unique setting in front of a huge audience, which itself will attract an even bigger audience. It is the sort of platform a candidate needing attention craves. You take the gig, hope for the best and prepare for the explosion of post-show media coverage.

The Harris campaign never understood this. Instead, they tried to strong arm Rogan into rolling over for them, even leaving his comfy studio to meet them at a hotel somewhere to record a one-hour interview. They should have known he had no reason to take that deal, but stupid people lack second order thinking. Their unearned confidence in themselves compounded the error by carrying on as if they were doing him a favor by entertaining the request.

Rogan, who never liked Trump, did the shrewd thing and invited Trump on his show and Trump happily accepted the millions in free media. The resulting program broke the internet and further humanized Trump. The theme of his campaign this time is that he has dropped the sharp edges, having learned from the past. Hamming it up with Rogan, who was a smitten kitten the whole time, underscored this theme. Team Dunning-Kruger handed Trump a huge win as a result.

This one incident among many is a microcosm of the growing Dunning-Kruger crisis we see unfolding everywhere. It is not just that these people lack the required talents or experience for the task. It is that they lack the innate ability for the roles and the self-awareness to recognize it. Stupid people who realize they are outmatched can be managed, but stupid people who think they are geniuses are a danger to everyone and everything they touch. Invisible stupidity is lethal.

Look at who is running the Harris campaign, and the problem is obvious. The campaign boss is named Julie Chávez Rodriguez. She has three names because her only reason to exist in politics is she is the granddaughter of Cesario Chavez. Her qualifications for politics are that she is female, brownish and related to a famous brown guy. She has parlayed that into a career doing busy work, so that the nice white ladies could put her face on the organization brochure.

Julie Chávez Rodriguez no doubt looks in the mirror each morning and sees a world bestriding figure, when in reality she is a hapless simpleton. She is in this role because of her long relationship with Kamala Harris, another strong diverse female who is brimming with confidence despite having done nothing on her own worth noting, other than being a concubine of Willie Brown. The Harris campaign operates like the marketing pitch for the Christopher Rufo project.

There have been terrible national campaigns in the past, but the cause was always a candidate with little to sell running against a favored incumbent. Mike Dukakis never had a chance in 1988, so his people had few good choices. Bob Dole in 1996 was simply running to pad his obituary. He had no chance against Clinton, and he certainly knew it, but played the role anyway. Harris has the full support of official Washington and the political regime but is still losing.

Given the reality of our politics, this sort of ineptitude may seem trivial, but the Dunning-Kruger crisis is rolling out everywhere. It is why certain members of the economic elite are panicking about DEI at elite universities. They suddenly realized that their good deed installing someone like Claudine Gay as president of Harvard could come at a price to them beyond embarrassment. Handing power to entitled stupid people brimming with unearned confidence is playing with fire.

It is comforting to think that maybe the outbreak of incompetence among the elites due to the cult of diversity will cause them to pull back, but that is not the way to bet because of the religious fanaticism around the cult of diversity. If Harris loses next week, expect to hear endless cries of racism. If she wins, the resulting catastrophe will be blamed on the bogeyman. The Dunning-Kruger crisis ends only when the forces and people behind it come to an end.

A New American Identity

Posted on October 29, 2024 by thezman

Note: If you are interested in an hour of precise predictions about the upcoming election, then you are in luck. I was on the Coffee and a Mike show and you can listen to the recording of it here.

The American civil war created an intellectual problem for both sides that was far more important than the issue of slavery. The 19th century was the age of nationalism and national liberation in Europe. These ideas made their way to America and fit in neatly with the American sense of self. After all, the United States was the result of a revolt against an empire in the name of national liberation. The war between the North and South, therefore, was also a war over nationalism.

By default, the South had the better claim. It was the South, after all, seeking to secede from the Union to create a new nation that would better serve the interests of the people of the South. The North was trying to prevent this from happening and willing to conquer the people of the South to do it. From a nationalist perspective, the South was the sympathetic side, even though they were also fighting for the right to maintain the institution of slavery.

A solution to this problem that evolved in the North was the argument that true nationalism was comprehensive. That is the nationalist loved all of his country and all of his people, so a nationalist government must serve and protect everyone. Since the South was not a different people and the Union was not abandoning them in the way the crown had abandoned the colonies in the runup to the Revolution, it was the South that was in violation of the nationalist ideal

Further, the evolving sense of Northern nationalism claimed that the national purpose of America from the start was to spread liberty around the world. America was the city on the hill, so to speak, that stood as an example of freedom craving nationalists around the world, so what the South was doing was a threat to that project and therefore a threat to the national purpose. American nationalism, unlike that of Europe, was a revolutionary nationalism to free all of mankind.

In fairness, these debates about the nature of American nationalism were not at the center of the dispute, but they played a role in shaping how the new intellectual class would define American identity after the war. Those arguing in favor of the war being a new founding are not entirely wrong. The country that emerged after the war was completely different from what existed prior to the war. It was not just free of slaves, but full of a sense of national purpose.

In his book After Nationalism, Samuel Goldman describes the three forms of national identity that have prevailed in America. Goldman comes up with three national identities he calls the Covenant, the Crucible, and the Creed. The Covenant is the sense of national purpose. The Crucible is the old melting pot story popular in the 20th century after the war. The Creed is the idea of America being a set of ideas, rather than a physical place or people.

It is a good book that offers a useful way of framing the main ways in which Americans have tried to create a unitary identity. Goldman does observe that it is the covenantal aspect of American identity that has been the most powerful, but he does not get into how this Puritan sensibility evolved in the 19th century during the Civil War to become a civic religion for the ruling elite. He does not mention how the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam blended into this as Jews took up posts in the elite.

This understanding of American identity, or the best effort at forging one, is essential to understanding the current crisis. For over a century, since Woodrow Wilson, America has been on a mission to heal the world. The ruling class has asked, often demanded, that the people put aside their regional and local concerns for the good of one great cause after another. It has become so ingrained in ruling class thinking that they seem incapable to thinking about the state of the country.

Strip away the panic, the hysteria and the outlandish claims and the coming election is about whether we care more about the fate of Mongolian transgender lesbians or the fentanyl epidemic in Appalachia. Do we care more about the abstract concept of climate change or addressing the slow collapse of our infrastructure? What counts for more as an American? The health of your neighbors or the plight of migrants? Will we sacrifice everything in a vain attempt to save the world?

All these questions stem from a growing doubt in this sense of American identity that has been with us since Gettysburg. Americans are increasingly wondering not only if the cost of saving the world is worth the effort, but if it makes any sense at all for us to stand astride the world, balances in our hand. Maybe the people who demand we do this do not have the right to judge the world. Maybe these people lack the moral standing to stand in judgement over us as well.

Fundamentally, the current crisis is about the covenant. If our national purpose is to be the city on the hill, then we must ensure that the city is not full of vagrants and racked with crime and corruption. If our national purpose is to heal the world, then we must first heal ourselves. On the other hand, maybe our national purpose was to avoid falling for these claims and instead focusing on creating a society in the wilderness, away from the entanglements of the old world.

No matter how one seeks to frame it, the struggle today is over our national purpose, a struggle between those who stubbornly cling to the last century and those looking ahead to the next century. The question is whether America will collapse in a heap, exhausted from trying to save the world or will we pull up, realize our folly and return to a sense of purpose rooted in simply being an example to the world? Will we attempt to heal ourselves with the same zeal with tried to heal the world?

It could also be that all these efforts at national identity have failed and what comes next is the great disaggregation. Perhaps it was always impossible to forge an American identity that could permanently hold the people together. Maybe in the end, we learn that the true American identity is no identity at all. We are simply a diverse collection of people who agree to cooperate, when necessary, but otherwise we prefer to leave the world alone and be left alone.

The Racial Binary Test

Posted on October 23, 2024 by thezman

There are issues that turn out to be litmus tests which tell us something about how certain people truly think about their politics. Covid, for example, revealed that many people who sounded like skeptics of the current regime were still willing to accept without question the claims of the regime. The war in Ukraine is another example where people who were media skeptics fell in line with the media narrative. Covid and Ukraine were tests of trust in the institutions.

These types of litmus test issues tell us where someone is mentally on that line that runs between those who trust the system and its institutions and those who no longer trust the system and its institutions. Those who wore masks and Ukraine lapel pins are at the pro-regime end of the scale, while those who rejected and criticized this stuff are on the other end of the scale. In both cases, we learned that some people were not that far along the path from the pro-regime pole.

There are other issues that are larger and more enduring that also work as a sorting mechanism in the churn of politics. In the mass media age, it is much easier for someone to pose as something, but not really be that something. Profilicity is not simply about creating a profile you present to parts of the world, but also the ability to quickly take down and respawn that profile with modifications. There are certain topics, however, that get to the nature of the person playing the character.

One of those issues is race, specifically racism. Unlike those prior litmus test issues, this is not one that exists on a scale. It is a binary issue. You either accept or reject the normative and positive claims baked into the word racism. There are those who think it is immoral to make decisions based on race and those who reject the idea that this behavior is immoral. There are those who reject the objective reality of race and those who accept what the human sciences tell us.

There is no middle ground on the race issue, even though lots of people seek to profit by occupying what they think is a middle ground. An example is this Compact Magazine post by Christopher Rufo. He is getting rich being a non-woke liberal or anti-woke civic nationalist, depending upon your label preference. The key to this character is the sort of triangulation Bill Clinton made famous. You see, he not only rejects left-wing racism, but he also rejects right-wing racism!

There is nothing new about this position. It was a popular in the 1980’s when it seemed like the culture was moving beyond race as a political weapon. The good people treated everyone as an individual. The bad people judged people on generalities. That meant the race hustlers like Jesse Jackson were just as bad as the old white racists from the civil rights narrative. They were judging people collectively. Like everything in this age, the new right and its new characters are just reboots of old material.

That aside, what you see with Rufo is that he does not understand the material and he embraces the morality of the people he claims to oppose. He opposes critical race theory not because it is nonsense, but because they acknowledge the centrality of race in American society. Rufo is an anti-racist, which means he thinks it is immoral to acknowledge the reality of race and especially immoral to act on it. In this regard, he agrees with Ibram X. Kendi, but only differs in presentation.

Further, Rufo does not seem to understand how we reached the point in American society where whites are under constant assault through these corporate and government diversity programs. He seems to think that the reason these programs exist is the people behind them are dumb or craven. Somehow, they tricked the leaders of the most powerful intuitions to embrace a form of racism. He may as well claim that these people are witches, who cast a spell over the institutions.

The fact is, these antiwhite pogroms, whatever you want to call them, are the logical outcome of generations of jurisprudence. The “Brown Test”, named for the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, implemented a set of racial and cultural standards that effectively eliminated free association and made openness the standard against which everything is measured. In effect, it made anything that results in racial inequality both illegal and immoral.

That means it is impossible to have a color-blind society under the Brown doctrine because it would lead to racial inequality. The underlying assumption of Brown and the entire moral edifice that sprang from it is that any racial inequality, not matter how trivial, must be the result of discrimination by whites. Therefore, a colorblind society that has racial inequality will mean that color blindness is the cause. It is why people like Ibram X. Kendi can reasonably say color blindness is racism.

This is what makes race a binary issue. You either understand the moral reasoning that lies behind the novelty of the word “racism” or you do not and simply accept it as part of your ethics. You either understand and accept the reality of race as a biological matter or you reject it and embrace the blank slate ideology. There is no middle position and no way to pick a few things from one column and a few from the other to create yourself a bespoke racial awareness.

In fairness, Rufo probably understands this, but the money in seeming to not understand it is too good to turn down. Even though the logic of the open society has led America down a dangerous moral and social cul-de-sac, the economic and managerial elites continue to cling to the moral framing of it. Cultural inertia is a real thing that drags along even the most powerful people and institutions. When there is no profit in opposition, there is no opposition.

The opposition we see among some elites to DEI and critical race theory rests in their own racial awareness. Jewish donors to elite colleges have grown concerned that they are now treated as white and therefore targets for the diversity rackets. Asians resent the racial spoils system that limits their access to elite institutions. The fact that whites may benefit from this opposition is incidental. Once again, we see that in politics, racial or otherwise, it is about who shall overcome whom.

Regardless of motivations, the people promoting the concept of a colorblind society are unwilling to address the root causes. Further, they fail to see that they are advocating a far more radical version of what Brown demands. To achieve the colorblind society, it means either eradicating those who see race or so terrorizing them that they pretend not to see race. The colorblind dogma makes anti-racism sound reasonable and its implementation would make the Khmer Rouge seem tame.

The Lives Of Others

Posted on October 22, 2024 by thezman

Since most anyone reading this has been alive, there has been a debate in what is called the right in America, about what to do about the right. Going back to the middle of the last century, the debate is about replacing the opposition to the ruling progressives with something new or reforming the current opposition. Once side thinks the current opposition is too corrupt to be reformed while the other camp thinks a startup has little chance to succeed, so reform is the best course.

If you go back to the early days of the Buckley movement, you find the same sort of debates going on among those members of the “new right.” The Buckley people did not have much of an “old right” to worry about, as it had collapsed in the FDR years, but they had the issue of the existing institutions. Should conservatives seek to create their own institutions or seek to take over existing ones? In the end, it was a mix of both choices that resulted in what is called Conservative Inc.

It is also why there is another debate about what to do with the old right among people trying to form up a new right. The complete failure of conservatism was made clear in the Bush and Obama years to everyone not getting a paycheck from one of the many conservative think tanks and institutions. Paul Gottfried coined the term “alternative right” in this period while commenting on the failure of movement conservatism to conserve anything more than their positions.

Everyone knows what happened to the alternative right, but the sense that something must rise up to replace Conservative Inc is still with us. People like Christopher Rufo, Matt Walsh and Michael Anton, all see themselves in the process of creating a new right for the current age. Amusingly, all of them are linked to nodes of the old right, places like Claremont, Hillsdale and others. Like Dionysus, they hope the new right will be born from the thigh of the old right.

This gets to the impossibility of either approach to creating a new right. On the one hand, you need money to hire writers, thinkers and activists. Raising that money one small donor at a time is hard and unpleasant, at least from the perspective of people who imagine themselves leading the new right. That means going to the people who have lots of cash to spare. Those are the people who fund the old right, which means making an accommodation with the old right.

Of course, if the old right saw a need to reform itself, it would do it, so the reformers coming in to fix things run into a wall of resistance. The donors like the institutions as they are, but they would like a little youthful energy to spruce things up, which is why they invite in the reformers. Like men who spend a long time in prison, the reformers are eventually institutionalized by the entities they seek to reform. Before long they are leading the charge to purge a heretic.

This has been the cycle since the full flowering of the Global American Empire after the Second World War. The opposition to the prevailing progressive orthodoxy, on the one hand, maintains a wall between the establishment and the public, while on the other hand, selectively recruiting some reformers to provide energy and the facade of opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy. Notice how all the members of the current new right sound like exhibits in the Reagan Museum.

It has always been assumed that what makes this system possible and so durable is the money supply. The golden rule says that the men with the gold make the rules, so if the donor class exists as it is, both the progressive orthodoxy and what is allowed to officially oppose it will not change. There is some truth to it, but there is more to it than just money. Even the money men find themselves constrained by a system that they supposedly control.

What has kept this system going is the social aspect of the commentariat. It operates as a subculture, separate from the larger culture. People have noted that Washington operates like a small town, and this is obvious in the commentariat. The people inside depend entirely on the system for their money, reputation, and friendships. It is a lot like how one percent biker clubs operate. You are either completely inside or completely outside the ecosystem. There is no middle ground.

This is why when it comes time to exile a heretic, all of his friends rush forth to condemn the man, often claiming to have never trusted him. On the one hand, they fear being associated with the heretic, but on the other it provides an opportunity to display their fidelity to the subculture. Like Brutus stoically standing by as his sons are executed for their participation in the Tarquinian conspiracy, members of the commentariat heap recriminations on former friends sent into exile.

As a result, everyone is always looking around for cues about what is currently acceptable within the system. When your livelihood depends on toeing the line at the office, you can think about getting a new job. When your social standing, friendships and family relations depend upon toeing the line within the political ecosystem of the commentariat, you can think of nothing but toeing the line. Everyone inside the system, even the donors, are terrified of being exiled.

This helps explain why our commentariat sounds so weird and alien. Our chattering classes are like the courtiers who live their lives walled up inside the king’s palace, talking amongst themselves. Everyone they know thinks the same things, says the same things and cares about the same things. Most important, they fear the same thing, which is the outer dark of exile. The result is a political commentariat that is isolated from the reality of the general public.

This model of the chattering class applies to the regime media, which is itself a subculture cut off from the general public. This model also applies to the managerial class, which now functions as a separate society, with its own economics, culture and morality, sitting atop the larger society. The thread that runs through all these subcultures among the Cloud People is fear of being expelled and having to live with John the Savage and the rest of the Dirt People.

The Decline Of Pop Music

Posted on October 16, 2024 by thezman

One of the unexpected consequences of the technological revolution is the death of the popular music industry. The sale of physical content has just about disappeared, outside of the vinyl subculture. Even if you count downloads, the gross sales of music decline more than ten percent per year. On a per capita basis, popular music revenues are a little more than half of their peak fifty years ago. The biggest drop in sales started with the introduction of the mp3.

Unlike the newspaper industry, which thought they could make money giving their content away on the internet, the music industry always saw technology as a threat to their business model. They famously fought the introduction of cassettes because it would make it easier to record and transport music. If you could copy that album and give the copy to a friend, the music industry reasoned, there would be no reason for the friend to buy the album.

The music industry went to extraordinary lengths to protect their cartel, but they simply could not hold off the flood of technology. They treated downloaders like the Israelis treat Palestinian civilians, but it failed to deter people from downloading free copies of the song they wanted. Eventually, the industry gave into reality and started selling single copies of songs, but by that point, the horse had left the barn. There are too many ways to get a copy of a song free of charge.

The hope was streaming services would stem the bleeding. Instead of loading up on free music maybe people would pay five bucks a month to have access to everything all the time from anywhere. That did seem to work for a while, but then it just further cratered the music sales side of the business. There is also the fact that the public does not listen to as much pop music as in the past. Part of it is demographics, but part of it is the collapse in the quality of content.

This is starting to damage the last area where money could be made in the music business, which is the live show. For the first time in a decade, excluding the Covid years, live shows are in decline. The popular excuse is to blame the ticket sellers and the secondary market for pricing people out of the events. The claim is the ticket sellers are gouging the consumer with demand-based pricing, which is like saying no one goes to a restaurant because it is too crowded.

One reason for the decline of live shows is Covid. A weird thing happened during Covid and that is people discovered that they could live without things they suddenly could not have due to the panic. Restaurants never fully recovered from Covid because people got used to not going out to dinner. Something replaced it. Live events are another thing people did not miss as much as expected. Pro sports have had to work hard to regain their crowds and college sports never fully regained them.

Another reason live music is struggling is the quality of the product. As the industry relies more on technology to create listenable content, the less able they are to stage compelling live shows. This is not a new problem. In the golden age of pop music, they often used studio musicians to record the songs. The “band” often could not play their own music at all. This limited the “band” to doing studio shows where they could lip-sync to the recorded music.

This changed in the 1960’s when bands could play their own music and insisted on recording their own music. They also did live shows where they could actually play their stuff and not sound like a bag of cats. Technology has reversed this so that the performers are no longer able to produce the songs live in any way that sounds like the recorded material. Technology has made it easier to make music, but that has resulted in fewer acts that can do live shows.

Here is where you see the damage done by hip-hop. This is content easy to create in the studio, but it is hot garbage when performed live. In a small venue, the tight spaces and use of drugs can result in a good time for the audience, but in an arena it is often hilariously terrible. It looks like that homeless guy who yells at passing cars got on the stage and is yelling at the audience. Whatever the merits, there are none, hip-hop does not make for a compelling live show.

Another issue for live music is young people are not being socialized in the meat space, so live shows fall outside of their comfort zone. A generation used to interacting with their peers through internet platforms is not going to see the live show as an opportunity for socializing and dating like the old days. They would rather hear the music while cartoon characters perform the concert online. For a generation that prefers the indoors, the outdoor music show may as well not exist.

Of course, the music business was always a racket. The golden years of pop was when the music companies ruled with an iron fist. They could make you buy the album when you wanted just one or two songs. They forced radio stations to play the songs they wanted played. Most important, they we free to rob the music acts. Technology nibbled away at the music cartel eventually freeing the consumers and the music creators from the clutches of the music companies.

One result is there is probably more music available now than in the golden age of popular music. Creators can make good stuff from their bedroom and make it available to the world via the internet. The other side of this is the days of the rock star are coming to a close. Taylor Swift is probably the last mega star and her fame is mostly due to her general weirdness. Her songs are popular because she is popular, not the other way around. Her music is secondary to her act.

Otherwise, the golden era of popular music, especially rock music, will be viewed as a strange artifact of the American empire. A generation from now that music may sound as weird and alien to young people as Chinese opera. They will not understand it, because the people and culture that produced it are as alien to them as the people and culture of China. The concept of the rock star will disappear with memories of phone booths and quadrophonic sound.

Democratic Theocracy

Posted on October 15, 2024 by thezman

Iran has been in the news lately and one of the interesting things about the coverage is Western media rarely talks about the president of Iran. In fact, almost all Iran stories skip the president entirely. This is highly unusual as Western media is conditioned to personify countries that are out of favor. The bad country becomes the ruler of that country and that ruler is always some form of Hitler. The closest they get with Iran is using a picture of the supreme leader in the copy.

One reason for this is Iran is a complicated place and Western media struggles with anything more complicated than the good guys versus bad guys narrative. Despite what most think, Iranian politics has factions and parties, with the winners being picked by the voters at fairly normal elections. Those factions and parties argue about all the usual things, including foreign policy. The current president ran on a platform of improving relations with the rest of the world.

The funny thing about Iran is that it has avoided what has happened with all prior revolutionary societies. They did not have rounds of purges or a great terror in which a strongman consolidated power. There is no cult of personality in the way most communist societies evolved. They are not dogmatically attached to a narrow set of economic policies. Instead, Iran has evolved into the world’s first explicitly democratic theocracy based in its form of Islam.

At the top of Iranian society is the Supreme Leader. He is appointed by the Assembly of Experts, who are elected to their positions. The Guardian Council approves all candidates for elected office, including those nominated to the Assembly of Experts, so the gatekeepers of politics are the religious authorities. The result is a political system that can debate and argue over public policy, but within the broad religious framing of the Islamic authorities.

This is why the West often talks about Iran as if it is a medieval society. In medieval Europe, the Church set the boundaries for secular government. The King had to be in good standing with the Church, but the Church needed to be in good standing with the king as he provided security. From the perspective of “secular” societies in the West, the Iranians have recreated a throne and altar society, something the West abandoned in favor of reason and democracy.

The interesting thing about the criticism is it comes with some envy. The managerial class of the West, especially in America, would probably prefer the explicit relationship between the moral and the practical. In Iran, if Islam forbids it, it is simply forbidden and that is the end of it. In America, banning the discussion of crime stats is forbidden for an extensive list of contradictory reasons sprinkled with magical thinking about the reality of the human condition.

This may be why Iran avoided the cycle of violence and authoritarianism that we expect to see with revolutionary societies. From the start, the morality of the revolution had been resolved. The main task was to first remove the prior regime and the Western influences that emanated from it. Once the old regime was gone, there was no void where the old morality existed, so there was no battle for who would decide how to fill the void and with what to fill it.

This may explain some of the convulsions of the West. Christianity and the carryover from it provided the moral center of the progressive ideology. That slowly gave way to opposition to communism in the Cold War. Once the great struggle had been won, there was no longer a moral purpose to the progressive ideology. What flowed into it was whatever was kicking around the institutions. Fringe lunacies suddenly had a clear path to the center of the progressive moral universe.

Once again, we see that Marx was right about politics. At the highest level, it is about the battle over moral questions. Once the moral questions are answered, there is no need for this sort of politics. Instead, politics is reduced to debates about how to address the mundane practical issues of governance. For thirty years Iran has only had to worry about defending itself from the West, while for the last thirty years the West has been searching for a new god to replace the old one.

What you see in Iran is something the West cannot reconcile and that is the limit of reason, which is the moral. The ideology of the West rests on the assumption that all moral questions have a reasonable answer, so all moral limits that cannot hold up to reason must be invalid. Iran does not struggle with this dilemma, because the moral limits are beyond question and they are right there in the Koran, as interpreted by the religious authorities.

Put another way, what Iran has in excess is the answer to the two most important questions for any society and they are “who says?” and “why not?” The answer to both questions is well known to everyone in Iranian society and therefore the questions never need to be asked. In the West, there are no answers to those questions, so the closest we get to an answer is the jungle of rules against discussing anything that challenges the sensibilities of the managerial class.

What we see with the contrast between Iran and the West, particularly America, is a contrast in two forms of democratic theocracy. Iran starts with the issue of morality as a settled matter and implements democracy as a means to sort practical ends. In the West, democracy is a moral end in itself, but the result is endless debates over what will be temporarily viewed as timeless truths. Iran is the mirror of American in terms of the relationship between the moral and the political.

There are other reasons why Iran is what it is, not the least of which is that it is full of Iranians who can date their society back to the ancients. Islam also has a vastly different view of the natural world than what evolved out of Christianity. Even so, the fact that Iran has survived as a democratic theocracy provides a clue for how American progressivism could survive as well. Otherwise, it shakes itself to pieces searching for something to fill the void that lies at the center of it.

Death Of The Grammar Nazi

Posted on October 10, 2024 by thezman

A truth revealed by the widescale adoption of the internet was that there were millions of people with a blue pencil desperate to use it. The Grammar Nazi is a thing unearthed and unleashed on the world by the internet. When comment sections were still common, every story or post came with comments correcting the grammar or highlighting a typo. It was clear that the person posting the comment had no interest in the content of the post, other than what he considered to be violations of the rules of grammar.

The Grammar Nazi is something that can only exist online. Sure, he could get a teaching job and terrorize school children or get a job as a copy editor at a newspaper, but where is the fun in that? The thing that brings joy to the black heart of the Grammar Nazi is correcting people who do not expect to be corrected. Finding a post online that has an open comment section and then posting a short note about a missing comma or the incorrect use of “there/their” is the fruit of life.

Unfortunately for the Grammar Nazi, his days are running short because the same forces that brought him to life are about to take away his life. Another thing we will get with AI is the rigid formalization of online discourse. The old fashioned spellcheck and grammar check in Word will soon be replaced by real-time rewrites of your text in the generally accepted form. That means no more grammar errors or spelling errors for the Grammar Nazi to hunt online.

There will be people who holdout and write their own text. There are people who still own pens and pads of paper. It will not be long, however, when the browser simply corrects your “mistakes” and rewrites your copy. Those idiomatic expressions you love so much will be replaced with text that can easily be translated into other languages and understood by new language learners. The same will happen with colorful euphemisms and salty language. None of it will be allowed.

You can see the future in Word. Run text through the old-fashioned spelling and grammar check and it regularly suggests you change the wording of sentences in order to make them less interesting. For example, if you type “There are a lot of mudgets in here”, misspelling “midgets” as you see, it will not suggest the word “midget” as the replacement because that is an offensive term. If you persist, it will warn that it is insensitive language. We know what comes next.

On the other hand, the genuinely stupid will soon be able to present themselves online as they imagine themselves through services like Grammarly that will rewrite their incoherent jibber-jabber into something intelligible. In fact, they will not even need to know how to read and write. They will just speak and the machine will figure out what they should write and write it. This woman will never have to worry that she may be a “magician” rather than a “musician.”

That may be a bridge too far, but you can see how these grammar services can quickly transition from mere grammar services into thinking services. The low-IQ person may not fully understand the resulting product, but the happy face emoji at the end of the process will let her know she did good. In effect, technology will remove the midwit from the internet and replace her with a bot, a bot that never makes a spelling or grammar error to give the game away.

It is easy to dismiss these sorts of claims about technology and the language, but they are based on our history with the printed word. The very idea of grammar as something to debate was made possible by the printing press. The necessary standardization that came with the mass production of text changed how we think. It changed the grammar, punctuation, spelling and even the alphabet. We write a different language as a result, which means we think in a different language too.

Unlike the time when the printing press revolutionized the world, ours is a much darker time with tighter rules on what can and cannot be said. We already see how the internet has narrowed and dulled the public debate. When it can intercede between your brain and what you are trying to write, it is easy to see how we can quickly get to a future that Orwell would have thought impossible. Soon, it may be impossible to post an impure thought or a poorly formed sentence.

Even if it does not reach that point, these writing services will surely strip originality and creativity from the language. The constant hectoring from Word about the use of “write a book” instead of “author a book” will eventually wear down users to the point where this sort of variety is gone from our writing. All nuance and idiosyncrasy will be replaced with the technical manual version that the robots demand. As a result, we will become as boring and stupid as a National Review columnist.

There are signs of this happening. This post about changes in German grammar is a good example of what lies ahead. This change is not to make German more precise to Germans, but to make it more accessible to non-German speakers. That may sound good to English speakers, but language is more than just how people speak. It is how they think and how they think evolved over generations. How they think is their inheritance from their ancestors and the core of their culture.

Of course, the main argument against the Grammar Nazi was that grammar is a fluid thing that changes over time. Obsessive concern for rules of grammar and word usage is a losing fight. After all, what we think of as punctuation is a novelty in the history of the written word. The core features of the current rules were innovations. To put an end to innovation is an effort to kill the spirit of the language. Like the people who speak it, the language must be free to seek its own path.

That is now where things are heading, at least not for the written word. It will not be long before the outlaw is the man who uses outlawed words in outlawed forums using now outlawed word processing software and browsers. Everyone else will screaming into the void that is the Large Language Model version of the software, as it rewrites their text to remove unpermitted thoughts and expressions. The Grammar Nazi will have been replaced by this new, hellish form of spellcheck.

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